Keywords

In classical sociology, the large, heterogeneous and anonymous city is the antithesis of the small, homogeneous, close-knit rural community (Durkheim, 1893; Redfield, 1947; Simmel, 1950 [1903]; cf. Tönnies, 2011 [1887]; Wirth, 1938). The growth of the urban population, together with its demographic, social, and economic diversification led to the development of an “urban lifestyle” (Wirth, 1938), which is marked by anonymity and diversity of forms of social life. The city offers a particularly broad spectrum of available forms of socialisation, but at the same time weakens primary ties and thus exposes individuals to psychological stress (Simmel, 1950 [1903]). Primary contacts are replaced by secondary contacts, bonds of kinship are weakened, the significance of family declines, neighbourhood disappear, and the traditional basis of social solidarity is undermined (Wirth, 1938: 76). It is therefore argued that the processes accompanying urbanisation and industrialisation have undermined the traditional foundations of community and thus confronted sociology with the so-called Community Question (Wellman, 1979; Wellman & Leighton, 1979), i.e. the question of what happens to communities under the conditions of a large, heterogeneous and anonymous city. Sociology has provided three different answers, known as the community lost, community saved and community liberated hypotheses (Wellman, 1979). The proponents of the community lost hypothesis proclaimed the decline and final collapse of the community, thus heralding the end of community studies, and considered the continued use of the concept of community as theoretically sterile and analytically unsuitable (cf. Day, 2006; Stein, 1960). On the other hand, the hypotheses of the community saved, and the community liberated maintained the sense and meaning of community studies but set different directions for the analysis of phenomena within the field of interest of these studies, for which the concept of community was only a common umbrella (cf. Block, 2008). Thus, in urban community studies, we can distinguish two main trends in defining community: as a place (ecological approach) and as social ties or sense of belonging (network and psychosocial approaches) (Bell & Newby, 1971; Blackshaw, 2010; Crow, 2002; Crow & Allan, 1994; Delanty, 2003; Klekotko, 2012) (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1
A block diagram of classical debates. Community questions are divided into lost, saved, and liberated. Further, lost leads to the end of community studies, saved leads to neighborhood and community work, and liberated leads to networks and imagined community.

Classical debates on community question

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Community Saved: Community as Place (Neighbourhood)

The community as place perspective sees territory and spatial proximity as the basis for the formation of networks of local interests and community identifications. It is the conjunction of these three elements, i.e. shared territory (spatial aspect), interests or otherwise objective ties (social aspect) and sense of community, i.e. subjective ties (psychological aspect), that constitutes the designation of the term ‘local community’ (Bell & Newby, 1971; Crow & Allan, 1994; Hillery, 1955; Lee & Newby, 1983; Poplin, 1972; Willmott, 1986). In the metropolitan context, community understood in this way has usually been identified with neighbourhood, which is considered independent entity with individual characteristics and as such the most primary unit for development of social ties, solidarity and cohesion (cf. Chaskin: 523). Thus, community saved hypothesis arguments for the survival of local communities in the form of the original neighbourhood groups and the informal ties that characterise them—neighbourhoods are places within cities in which—despite the heterogeneity and size of the city—community-based social relations can be identified (Mooney & Neal, 2009: 13). It is argued that close ties in cities are likely to persist, despite disintegrating social and spatial mobility, and are especially observed in disadvantaged neighbourhoods experiencing economic and social marginalization, inhabited by disadvantaged groups that must work together to defend themselves against severe structural changes and an unfavourable external environment (Allan & Phillipson, 2008; Gans, 1968; Suttles, 1968; cf. Wellman, 1979; Whyte, 1943). Community studies become neighbourhood studies and it is on individuals and neighbourhood relations that researchers focus their attention.

Conceptualising urban community as neighbourhood origins from the works of the Chicago School, which have had a great influence on community studies in an urban context. According to Robert E. Park, a father of the Chicago School, “proximity and neighborly contact are the basis for the simplest and most elementary form of association with which we have to do in the organization of city life. Local interests and associations breed local sentiment, and, under a system which makes residence the basis for participation in the government, the neighborhood becomes the basis of political control. In the social and political organization of the city it is the smallest local unit” (Park, 1915: 580).

The ideas of the Chicago School scholars were inspired by the observation of the transformation and development of the great cities of America under the influence of the intensified processes of urbanisation and industrialisation, accompanied by a great wave of immigration from the old world: the question was how, through what mechanisms, the structure and organisation of urban space are produced. The search for answers to these questions drew on the achievements of the natural sciences (Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species) and the humanities (Dewey’s American pragmatism). This is how social ecology was born (Park, 1936). Transferring Darwin’s concepts of ecological processes to the analysis of urban processes, researchers of the Chicago school considered the city as an ecosystem and the community as the “essence of the mechanism of adaptation” of people to the environment (cf. Hawley, 1950: 31). This adaptation occurs through the coordination and organisation of individual activities into the form of a single collective unit (ibid.). The local community thus becomes a territorial system of organising action and is intended to serve the needs of subsistence.

The basic unit of a city’s spatial structure is the natural area—the smallest homogeneous territorial unit, formed naturally, characterised by social and cultural cohesion, its own traditions, customs, standards and values. Natural areas are formed through natural processes of competition for space in a “struggle for existence” (Park, 1973: 33). As a result of this competition between various social groups for access to resources “Personal tastes and convenience, vocational and economic interests, infallibly tend to segregate and thus to classify the populations of great cities. In this way, the city acquires an organization and distribution of population which is neither designed nor controlled. In the course of time every section and quarter of the city takes on something of the character and qualities of its inhabitants (Park, 1925: 5)”. Statistical homogeneity, mutual interdependence and common forms of life of population living in the natural area favour development of primary ties of kinship, local identity and solidarity, and thus lead to social cohesion and cultural integration, as result of which a neighbourhood come into being, “a locality with sentiments, traditions, and a history of Its own” (Park, 1925: 6). Neighbourhoods are therefore a result of processes of spatial segregation, “sifting and sorting” mechanisms that “establish moral distances which make the city a mosaic of little worlds” (Park, 1925: 40). They are a combination of “geographical boundaries, ethnic or cultural characteristics of the inhabitants, [and] psychological unity among people who feel that they belong together” (Hallman, 1984: 15). In other words, the neighbourhood community is a combination of territory, objective bonds and subjective bonds.

The reference point for the conceptualisation of the neighbourhood as a community was the traditional “folk community” (cf. Redfield, 1947): small, isolated, homogeneous, self-sufficient, close-knitted and cohesive, with a strong sense of group solidarity and intimate primary ties of kinship. Perceiving an urban community in such terms must have raised concerns about its decline. Hence, one of the main concerns of the ecological approach is the problems of social isolation, alienation and disorganisation of urban communities. Ecological determinists claimed that these processes are inevitable as the population of cities become more numerous, dense and heterogeneous, which creates a sense of detachment and diminish social ties (Wirth, 1938). In other words, with increasing urbanisation, the diversity of the population is growing, thus making social ties based on similarity lose their foundation. This claim has been questioned by rich empirical evidence delivered by the compositional theoreticians who were proving that there are no inherent negative consequences of residing in dense urban environments, as social bonds continue to function effectively although their strength may vary by demographic, social and cultural composition of the neighbourhood (e.g. Fischer et al., 1977; Gans, 1962; Howell, 1973; Keller, 1968; Suttles, 1968; Whyte, 1943). Herbert Gans (1962: 65–66) suggests that urban population still “consists mainly of relatively homogeneous groups, with social and cultural moorings that shield it fairly effectively from the suggested consequences of number, density, and heterogeneity”. Such homogenous groups can be observed particularly in immigrant, ethnic or class neighbourhoods. In such communities, ethnic and class antagonisms and interests strengthen a sense of solidarity and where ethnicity and class overlap, social ties and group solidarity are intensified. This has been widely investigated and demonstrated also in British studies on working-class community which contributed greatly to the development of community studies, particularly to the popularity of conceptualisation of community as a neighbourhood (eg. Bulmer, 1975a, 1975b; Hoggart, 1957; Jackson, 1968; Jackson & Marsden, 1962; Lockwood, 1966; Mogey, 1956; Parkin, 1971; Roberts, 1971, 1978; Willmott, 1963; Willmott & Young, 1986, etc.).

Compositional ecologists paid particular attention to various marginalised neighbourhoods which were attributed to social disorganisation and anomy. Studies of Gans (1962) on “urban villagers” in East End of Boston, Whyte’s (1943) studies on “street corner” community in Italian-American neighbourhood or Suttles’s (1968) studies on social order of the ghetto in Chicago’s New West Side challenged negative perceptions of these neighbourhoods and demonstrated that far from their reputation, they were not chaotic lawless places, but instead possessed their own social structure, norms and rules that governed interactions among residents and provided social order. They appeared to be organised and cohesive communities with a strong sense of belonging and vibrant community life based on solid kinship ties, group solidarity and informal self-help networks of support taking various forms of mutual assistance. Residents developed adaptive strategies to navigate and survive within their challenging circumstances, like forming social networks, engaging in informal economies, or creating alternative systems of governance. This evidence therefore provided arguments that were perfectly in line with the Chicago School’s conceptualisation of community as a system of adaptation of people to their environment and supported the community-saved hypothesis.

Another thread that developed within the community-as-neighbourhood approach in the context of community decline was linked to the problem of the rise of an “underclass” and social pathology in neighbourhoods of high poverty. It is assumed that the problem of pathology in these neighbourhoods is due to the spatial concentration of social characteristics of individuals—ethnicity, age, unemployment, etc.; thus creating a culture of poverty. The lack of social diversity is linked to the absence of desirable social role models (working, successful people). The neighbourhood is in decline and attracts new residents who are not coping, in turn, the traditional residents move out, there are more and more ethnic groups who remain disintegrated, and the problem of disintegration is also responsible for the rest. The lack of a middle class and better off lower class (social buffer) causes institutions to disappear from the neighbourhood. Therefore, the main focus of urban policies has been the social diversification of problematic residential neighbourhoods, through investments in housing infrastructure, building renovations and better landscaping and attracting middle-class representatives. Since mixed neighbourhoods are believed to make neighbourhoods safer, healthier and more vibrant (both economically and socially), they are particularly desired social forms in urban planning. Such positive effect of the mixed neighbourhood is supposed to be based on social contact between individuals of different socio-economic status which in turn is believed to favour positive role modelling, stronger collective control over disorder, reduced exposure to violence, lower incidences of deviant behaviour, better employment prospects, improved access to higher quality services and institutions, and elimination of geographic stigma (Galster, 2012, 2015). However, empirical evidence suggests that unprivileged populations do not significantly benefit from the mixed neighbourhood strategies, and in some cases, their situation gets even worse (cf. Levy et al., 2013: 20). According to Galster (2015: 8), “the reasons for this failure can be excessive social distance (Arthurson, 2012), social distinction (Davidson, 2012; Paton, 2012), spatial separation of (tenure) groups (Bailey et al., 2006), or different everyday time schedules (Fraser et al., 2012)” which prevent social contact.

Building on the achievements of the Chicago School and its pragmatism, the “community saved” approach in community studies is fundamentally oriented towards practice, intervention and social engineering. Since the city is believed to be entirely a product of human activity and may be fashioned freely by human will, social problems can be managed through appropriate urban planning (Delanty, 2003: 52–53). “Community saved” approach thus abounds with concepts and ideas for city repair: from programmes in city planning like New Urbanism (cf. Grant, 2006), ecological urbanism (cf. Ruano, 1998; Sharifi, 2016), placemaking (Markusen & Gadwa, 2010; Schneekloth & Shibley, 1995) and programmes of revitalisation and regeneration of neighbourhoods (Bassett, 1993), to community work concepts like Community Development or Community Capacity Building (cf. Barr & Hashagen, 2000; Bush et al., 2002; Chaskin et al., 2000; Kretzman & McKnight, 1996), to new localism and communitarian ideas of responsive or inclusive communities (Etzioni, 1983, 1996; Giddens, 1998; Tam, 1998), all of them consider (re)building and supporting communities a key for solving social problems, achieving objectives of social policy and building better future.

The importance of urban planning for social relationships in neighbourhoods has been recognised, among others, by Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte whose studies and concepts were a critical response to the problems spawned by programme of so-called “urban renewal”, also known as urban redevelopment or urban regeneration. The programme was aimed to fight the economic and social decline of the inner city inhabited by a disadvantaged low-income population, whose poor housing conditions were believed to favour social disorder, concentration of social problems and pathologies, and eventual transformation of the neighbourhood into a slum. The programme was intended to confront urban decay by cleaning the inner city of “slums” and replacing them with high-rent apartments and business facilities. “Problematic” slum dwellers were relocated to new affordable public housing. The relocation was intended to improve the quality of life of those displaced and reform them economically and morally, while restoring the economic value of land in the inner city. However, the idea turned out to be erroneous: new public housing multiplied social problems instead of solving them.

Jane Jacobs, like William H. Whyte, criticised urban renewal programmes primarily for their insensitivity to human nature and the needs of city dwellers. The authors, like Gans (1969), argued for the fallacy of the thesis of the social disorder of the inner city, pointing to various social resources of traditional neighbourhood that provided social support and ordered local structure. In her celebrated, the almost iconic book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” (1961), Jacobs argues that in a traditional inner-city neighbourhood, where social life takes place on the street, the order is policed by the residents themselves, whose “eyes on the street” keep both themselves and strangers safe. The author points to the advantages of the mixed primary uses of urban space, which promotes walkability and the fact that more time is spent in the neighbourhood, which in turn leads to people recognising each other, which help them to look after each other and control the order. As she notices “When there are people present in a public space such as city streets, it strengthens the space and inspires social cohesion” (1961). On the basis of frequent interactions caused by “bumping into” the same people, a social capital is created that is not found in single-use, large-scale housing developments. Similarly, Whyte (1980, 1988) draws attention to the fact that, as a result of urban renewal, American cities have lost what the author calls “human scale” and are thus becoming the hotbed of numerous social problems. Restoring cities to this “human scale” is the only solution to these problems.

The works of Jacobs and Whyte and the activities of the movements inspired by them led to the birth of a new paradigm in urban planning: new urbanism. The new paradigm started from a critique of America’s post-war city planning doctrine, marked by urban sprawl, functional zoning and car traffic-dependence. Instead of development of the urban fabric through spatial expansion of single-use, low-density residential neighbourhoods and segregated commercial centres, it proposes development of multifunctional spaces with high density of population. Such urban design is believed to favour social cohesion and community building. As Grant (2006: 15) put it: “New urbanism seeks to create opportunities for positive social interactions in space. It represents an effort to create local spaces for socialising: places to shop, educate, play, and work near home. New urban approaches typically envision bustling streets, with people hopping on streetcars, calling “hello” to the greengrocer on their way home. Nostalgic views of intensely interactive small communities of times past animate the vision” The New Urbanism is based on 10 principles: walkability, connectivity, mixed use and diversity, mixed housing, quality architecture and urban design, traditional neighbourhood structure, increased density, green transportation, sustainability and quality of life. The ideal city should consist of relatively self-sufficient, interconnected neighbourhoods based on a traditional concentric structure. These neighbourhoods should secure all the basic needs of the inhabitants and all necessary amenities should be within a 15-minute walking distance, so that moving by car is not necessary for daily functioning. Functional zoning should be avoided, as mixed use and diversity of functions promote more time spent on the street and more frequent contact between residents in diverse contexts, thereby thickening social relationships, improving residents’ sense of security, embedding them emotionally in a place and increasing psychological comfort, while reducing existential stress. It is important that such neighbourhoods offer a mixed housing, accessible to diverse social groups. Great importance was attached to the appropriate architecture of buildings and the planning of urban spaces, so that they are not only pleasing to the eye and provide an aesthetic experience (after all, in new urbanism it is important to live beautifully), but also foster social relations and build a sense of locality. In other words, new urbanism expresses the idea of living locally, in harmony with the environment and human nature, in a beautiful way. Urban planning should be thus focused on the creation of interconnected sustainable “urban villages”. Such an idea has gained much public attention in recent years and is known as “15-minute neighbourhood” or “20-minute city” and every time gains more supporters.

The idea of mixed primary use is implicitly linked to the belief in the importance of the public spaces for social life. Where there is no public space, there is no social life and structure, and order are replaced by chaos and disorganisation. It is therefore important to build public spaces, and this is facilitated by the concept of mixed primary use, among which amenities such as grocery shops, coffee shops, hair salons or bookstores play a particularly important role. The importance of these spaces was perfectly described by Ray Oldenburg (1989), who calls them third places. Third places are places where people spend time between home (“first” place) and work (“second” place): as White (2018: 6) put it: “your third place is where you relax in public, where you encounter familiar faces and make new acquaintances”. According to Oldenburg, the author of the concept, third places are inclusively sociable places that facilitate and foster broader interaction, they are “anchors” of community life that favour establishing a sense of place. As such they play an important role in development of the civil society and civic engagement and thus democracy. For urban space to become a “third place”, it must meet several requisites. According to Oldenburg, people who frequent third places have the freedom to come and go as they please, without any obligations tying them to the location financially, politically, legally, or otherwise. In third places, individuals’ social or economic status is not significant, fostering a sense of commonality among the occupants. The main activity in these places is conversation, which is often light-hearted, playful and filled with humour. Third places must be easily accessible to all, accommodating the needs and desires of their occupants. Regular visitors to third places contribute to the atmosphere and help newcomers feel welcome. Third places have a modest and homely environment, lacking pretentiousness or extravagance, and they embrace individuals from diverse backgrounds. The atmosphere in third places is characterised by a playful nature, free from tension or hostility. For those who frequent them, third places evoke a sense of warmth, belonging, and a feeling of being at home, offering a spiritual renewal.

The idea of third places as well as the ideas of new urbanism can be found in the extremely popular (especially in the USA) concept of placemaking, and its latest variant, creative placemaking. The concept of placemaking is based on the idea of building communities around places. Good places are characterised by accessibility, rich activities, sociability, and comfort. They are visible, easy to get to and around, full of diverse activities that foster social interactions, nurture and define sense of community, and promote sense of safety and comfort. They also build and support the local economy, as well as promote health and sustainable habits. The placemaking is about transforming public spaces into such places: “it is a multi-faceted approach to the planning, design and management of public spaces. Put simply, it involves looking at, listening to, and asking questions of the people who live, work and play in a particular space, to discover their needs and aspirations. This information is then used to create a common vision for that place. The vision can evolve quickly into an implementation strategy, beginning with small-scale, do-able improvements that can immediately bring benefits to public spaces and the people who use them” (PPS & MPC, 2008: 5). The concept of placemaking is based on the “power of 10 + ” rule. It is believed that a great place needs to have at least 10 things to do in it or 10 + reasons to be there, great destination needs 10 + such places and great city or region needs at least 10 great destinations. It is not about huge investments and large-scale urban planning, though—the placemaker starts with petunias: light, quick and cheap projects (the “LQC” rule) that bring immediate change to the space with minimal effort and as such build a sense of agency among the community. The key is that placemaking is not only about the outcome—building a vital public destination—it is also about the process, which is participatory, collaborative, empowering and inclusive. As Lynda Schneekloth and Robert Shibley put it, placemaking “is not just about the relationship of people to the places; it also creates relationships among people in places” (Schneekloth & Shibley, 1995: xii; cf. Fleming, 2007). Through the process of making places, the community is built: “With community-based participation at its center, an effective placemaking process capitalizes on a local community’s assets, inspiration, and potential, and it results in the creation of quality public spaces that contribute to people's health, happiness, and wellbeing” (PPS).

While placemaking is about transforming public spaces into vital places, creative placemaking is about transforming them around the arts. The term “creative placemaking” was introduced by Ann Markusen together with Anna Gadwa (2010) in their study prepared for city mayors, architects and urban planners and commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts, an independent agency of the US federal government tasked with supporting the development of the arts, their dissemination to American citizens and cultural education. In the words of the authors of the study “In creative placemaking, partners from public, private, non-profit, and community sectors strategically shape the physical and social character of a neighborhood, town, city, or region around arts and cultural activities. Creative placemaking animates public and private spaces, rejuvenates structures and streetscapes, improves local business viability and public safety, and brings diverse people together to celebrate, inspire, and be inspired” (ibid.: 3). Thus, what would distinguish primary “placemaking” from “creative placemaking” is precisely the factor of creation—the use of artists, arts and cultural-artistic activities in placemaking strategies. Creative placemaking is aimed at building vibrant, distinctive, diverse, and sustainable communities and economies. It is believed that the use of arts and creativity allows to overcome social, economic and cultural differences and divisions in the community in pursuing this goal. In his description of the placemaking process Tom Borrup (2016: 1; cf. Fleming, 2007) notes that “It builds on local human, physical, and cultural assets to enhance the social and civic fabric. It builds on distinctive local character and story. It is a long-term, partnership-based strategy that results from a commitment to social equity and a meaningful life for its residents as well as an interesting experience for visitors and a stronger economic base for the area. A key thread through the creative placemaking process is building on the identity and historical trajectory of the place—with all the gifts and baggage that history carries. Ultimately, creative placemaking attempts to strengthen relationships between and among people, and between people and place, building a community where stewardship of one another and of place is central”.

The assumption about urban planning as a tool for solving social problems has also given rise to the development and professionalisation of community work, which was eventually recognised as a third method (next to individual and group one) of the social work in 1962. The concept of community work originates from the settlements movement that began in the late nineteenth century in the UK and later spread to Europe and the United States. The movement aimed to assist marginalised neighbourhoods by creating settlements where middle-class activists would live and collaborate with the local community. The objective was to foster community development through positive role modelling, inspiring individual aspirations, and empowering residents to engage in public and political activities. A particularly significant role in development of the community work was played by the Hull House settlement created by Jane Adams in Chicago in 1889, which became a research laboratory for community work. Together with scholars from the Chicago School, Hull House laid the foundations not only for community work, but also for broader community and urban studies. Over time, the idea of community work evolved, accommodating a variety of concepts and approaches, including community organisation, community development (Christenson, 1989; Fear et al., 1989; Littrell & Hobbs, 1989; Midgley, 1986; Morris, 1970), community capacity building or asset-based community development (ABCD) (Alinsky, 1969; Arole et al., 2004; Bush et al., 2002; Chaskin et al., 2000; Frank & Smith, 1999; Kretzmann & McKnight, 1996; McGinty, 2002; Skinner, 2006). All these approaches emphasise local participation and believe that local community is best suited to address social issues, respond to insufficiency of the welfare state and drive development. Therefore, they advocate for organising local communities as the basis for development strategies, programmes, and social policies. They promote self-sufficiency, self-help, and self-reliance, which are based on the belief that people, by working together, can improve their own circumstances, solve problems, and enhance their social and economic well-being, and through this collaboration foster a stronger sense of community. Since community development can only occur when local residents actively contribute their resources, development efforts should mobilise internal resources and mechanisms within the community, relying on informal social networks and formal local institutions. The objective is to enhance the skills and capacities of individuals, local groups and organisations to take effective action and lead community development by enabling them to define and achieve goals, actively participate in planning and management processes, and foster local partnerships. Social cohesion and social capital are crucial aspects of this process, as they help overcome challenges through collective decision-making, cooperation and problem-solving.

Interest in locally embedded communities is growing in the face of increasing globalisation and its negative effects on the social fabric, such as increased inequalities and social divisions, exclusion and alienation, displacement, social disruption, economic exploitation, or environmental degradation, among others. The answers to these problems are sought in local communities as an alternative to the global order. They can be found, among others, in the concepts of localism and communitarianism (Etzioni, 1993, 1996; Nisbet, 1973; Sites, 1998; Tam, 1998; Walzer, 1983 [1996]). Both concepts place the local community at the centre as a primary unit of social organisation and advocate for relative autonomy and empowerment of communities within a wider socio-spatial and political system. They emphasise concentrating social and economic life in local communities and giving them primacy over the broader socio-spatial arrangement. Local communities are viewed as essential for addressing the social, political, and economic well-being of individuals, mitigating the divisions caused by economic globalisation, tackling unemployment issues, reviving citizenship, and addressing unmet human needs that the state and market fail to address (Nisbet, 1973; Taylor et al., 2000). This idea gained traction in the 1970s as a response to the crisis of centralised state, which, as Daniel Bell aptly put it was becoming too small to solve big problems and too big to solve small problems (Bell, 1988), and has seen a resurgence in the face of intensified globalisation and failed modernisation projects.

In their quest for community, localism and communitarianism point to a new type of community (Etzioni, 1993, 2001; Giddens, 1999; Tam, 1998). These kinds of communities tend to function in the sphere of potential and temporary integration, with the integrating factor being the problem or goal facing the collective. New types of local communities are emerging and operating within public spaces. They are not defined by traditions or neighbourhood ties but by collective actions and shared goals that benefit the entire community. While traditional communities existed in both public and private spheres, the new type of local community is exclusively focused on the public sphere and is based on civic activity of its members. Spatial proximity no longer plays a central role in constituting these communities; instead, functional proximity takes precedence. The formation of the new type of local community is less about familiarity with neighbours and more about interdependence and cooperation with others at a given time. The nature of ties within these communities is also changing. Original neighbourhood and family ties are being replaced by instrumentalised ties, shaped by collaborative efforts towards shared goals. While cooperation may lead to lasting camaraderie, it is not the sole determinant of community formation. Unlike traditional communities that exerted control over various aspects of individuals’ lives, the new type of local community does not claim authority over personal or private spheres. It is limited to the realm of citizenship and civic engagement. Individuals choose to become members based on their own subjective decision, in contrast to being automatically part of a community by birth. The inclusivity of public space extends to the inclusivity of membership in these communities, which remain open to external cultural values. This openness and diversity provide a significant margin of freedom in terms of social control.

In the communitarian view, communities of a new type should also have specific moral characteristics to foster social cohesion and guide individual behaviour. Indeed, the main concern of this approach is the contradiction between the ever-increasing rights of individuals and their disproportionately low social obligations and responsibilities. According to communitarians, both a social order founded on extreme individualism and an order that disregards individual interests ultimately result in the destruction of society. Therefore, they postulate to find a balance between social order and individual autonomy within a unified social structure, such as a local community in which individual rights are balanced with social obligations and responsibilities (Etzioni, 1996). According to communitarians, there should be agreement within the community on a core set of values, such as respect for others, empathy, or social justice (Giddens, 1999). The achievement of these values is fostered by a coherent socialisation system. Communitarianism recognises the role of social institutions, such as families, schools, and civic organizations in shaping individuals and fostering social cohesion. These institutions provide the moral and cultural foundations that contribute to the well-being of individuals and society. The concept of community that accommodates these propositions has been proposed by Amitai Etzioni (1993). The author proposes the term “responsive community” which he describes as a community where its members share a sense of responsibility and actively engage with one another. In his view, individuals have a duty to contribute to the well-being and common good of their communities. The author emphasises the significance of mutual support, cooperation, and a willingness to address the needs and concerns of others within the community. In a responsive community, individuals play an active role in the decision-making processes that impact their lives and work together to find solutions to common problems. This includes a commitment to social justice, inclusivity, and the well-being of all community members. A responsive community values public dialogue and deliberation as means to reach consensus and make collective decisions. It emphasises the importance of involving diverse perspectives and engaging in a democratic process to address societal challenges and shape communal policies. Etzioni argues that a responsive community fosters a strong sense of belonging, trust and social cohesion, which in turn contributes to the overall quality of life and resilience of the community.

The concepts of inclusive and responsive local communities of a new type that are based on reintegration in public space are being recognised, applied and adapted by a variety of programmes for social repair and development in various contexts around the world (cf. Dominelli, 2007; Etzioni, 1995; Hopper, 2003; Klekotko, 2012; Mayo, 1994, 2002; Nisbet, 1953; Rubin & Rubin, 2001; Warburton 1998). The aim of these programmes and public policies is to build identification with place, strengthen local ties and social support networks, and enhance local agency and participation, thus rebuilding the community by creating a so-called new locality in which “place” and “locality” are central categories (cf. Gorlach & Klekotko, 2012; Klekotko, 2012; Klekotko & Gorlach, 2011). By building strong, open, civic local communities, general social goals and tasks of social and welfare policy of the state are realised. In other words, the “new localism”, as well as communitarian proposals, serve to solve social problems and build development and repair programmes around resilient communities.

The community-as-place approach has played and continues to play an extremely important role in community studies, orienting research, policies and practice. However, there are some shortcomings of the approach that limit our understanding of communal phenomena in cities. The main criticism refers to the spatial determinism of the approach which identifies community with neighbourhood, making the two terms the “Siam’s twins” of the community studies (Blokland, 2003). The main limitation of the approach is thus that “the identification of a neighbourhood as a container for communal ties assumes the a priori organizing power of space” (Wellman & Leighton, 1979: 366). As Barry Wellman aptly points out, even if we recognise that space does indeed organise some relationships, we cannot assume that absolutely all community ties are enclosed in solidary neighbourhood communities. In fact, communities also exist and persist beyond neighbourhood boundaries; moreover, neighbourhood in itself does not predicate the emergence of a solidary community. Therefore, there is no reason to assume that communities are formed at the place of residence and confined to its boundaries. According to Wellman, at least several factors determine that this is not the case: the separation of residence from workplace, high residential mobility, cheap and effective transportation and communication, scale, density, and diversity of the city and the nation-state, as well as the spatial dispersion of primary ties and the heterogeneity of the city (1979: 1206). The aforementioned factors decide upon weakening solidary attachments within the neighbourhood, while favouring establishing new ties outside it.

Neighbourhood is thus not equal to community and the two terms must not be used interchangeably. Local social ties should be considered the result of the choice of active individuals who use the resources of the neighbourhood to satisfy their rational and emotional needs. Depending on their social and demographic characteristics, individuals are guided in their actions by different needs and goals, establishing and maintaining ties with partners appropriate to these goals and needs. In this way, the “'neighbourhood” becomes terrain of many different local communities with different socio-demographic composition, different functions and goals, and different forms of sociability. Participation in a variety of communities depends on the stage of the life cycle in which the acting individuals currently find themselves. The strongest ties to the local community (neighbourhood) are maintained by its youngest and oldest residents, although the strength of this connection will be modified by other characteristics of the individuals’ life situation, especially their socio-economic status and gender. Nevertheless, it is in the case of the youngest and oldest residents that the various circles in which they participate tend to have the greatest tendency to “overlap” with each other, including often the circle of the immediate “neighbourhood” itself. In traditional communities, pre-school and early school-age children revolve around the same people—the same friends participate in backyard games as in kindergarten. The same is true for older residents who, having completed their working lives, cease to function outside the context of the neighbourhood and it is in the immediate neighbourhood that their daily activities are confined.

Since the approach primarily focuses on the spatial and structural aspects of communities, such as physical proximity and neighbourhood characteristics, it tends to reduce complex social phenomena to simplistic explanations, overlooking other factors that shape community, including among others social, cultural, and historical processes or individual agency. The approach tends to oversimplify and homogenise communities by treating them as uniform entities with shared characteristics, while, in reality, communities are often diverse, composed of individuals with different interests, values, and identities. Neither are communities as stable and static entities as the ecological approach wants to see them. Therefore, other approaches enter into the game in order to explain phenomena that escape from the view of the ecological approach.

Community Liberated: Community as Networks

The community-liberated hypothesis in community studies strips away the nature of the substrate of bonding and community identification, thus opening the door to interpretations other than merely territorial. By liberating community from territory, it liberates sociology from the Community Question (cf. Wellman, 1979). Originally, the community-liberated hypothesis was formulated by Barry Wellman in his great essay on community question as an argument for conceptualising communities as networks. The community liberated hypothesis is thus referred to as network approach. However, new developments in community studies gave place to cultural turn that led to new conceptualisations of community as liberated from territorial basis. Therefore, I propose to identify two trends in the community liberated hypothesis: on the one hand, there is a network perspective that focuses on “personal networks” of individuals connected to each other by direct primary ties, which do not necessarily have collective self-awareness and which never go beyond inter-individual direct contacts. On the other hand, there is the psychosocial trend (community as sense of belonging) that focuses on the psychosocial layer of the phenomenon, i.e. the sense of belonging and collective cultural consciousness (cf. Klekotko, 2012; Klekotko & Gorlach, 2011). Both approaches invalidate space as an indispensable substrate of community and in this sense, they “liberate” the community from spatial determinism of the community saved approach.

Conceptualisation of the community as the network has been introduced by Barry Wellman. The author states that “The Libereted argument contends that primary ties now tend to form sparsely knit, spatially dispersed, ramifying structures instead of being bound up within a single densely knit solidarity (…). While such ties may have lever strands in the relationships than those in which kinship, residence, and work are combined, they are prevalent and important sources of sociability and support” (Wellman, 1979: 1207). Wellman builds on reach evidence from various studies on primary ties in urban context (Breiger, 1974; Fischer, 1976; Granovetter, 1973; Laumann, 1973; Schulman, 1976; Shorter, 1975; Walker, 1977) that indicate that urban residents establish relationships and ties independent of their place of residence, within contexts other than neighbourhood. One of particularly influential evidence was provided by Claude Fischer’s concept of subcultural urbanism. Although Fischer represents the ecological school, and his concept of subcultural urbanism combines two currents of this school, namely the deterministic current represented by Wright (1938), according to which the city produces diversity which diminishes social bonds, and the compositional current, represented by Oscar Lewis or Herbert Gans (1962), in which cities are mosaics of communities linked by ties based on demographic and socio-economic similarity, has inspired to move away from conceptualising community as neighbourhood and to replace it with the notion of networks. Fischer examines the role of subcultures in shaping urban communities and identities. The author argues that cities are characterised by coexistence of diverse subcultures based on distinct norms, values, and lifestyles. These subcultures emerge as a response to the diversity of urban life and are independent of residence, stretching out of the neighbourhoods. Wellman suggests thus to analyse social networks instead of neighbourhoods, claiming that “Social network analysis provides a useful way to study community without presuming that it is confined to a local area” (Wellman, 2001: 15). Indeed, the network analysis allows to capture social relations and their structures “wherever they may be located and whoever they may be with” (ibid.). In other words “the network approach allows analysts to go looking for ties that transcend groups or localities” (ibid.: 16). Thus, for Wellman communities became “networks of inter personal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging, and social identity” (2001: 1).

The social network analysis approach avoids socio-psychological individualism—the researcher is not interested in the solidary sentiments, collective perceptions and normative attitudes of individuals, but only in their actual contacts with other individuals. Social network analysis takes on external observer perspective and “starts with a set of network members (sometimes called nodes) and a set of ties that connect some or all nodes” (Wellman, 2001: 15). It then “trace the relationships of the persons they are studying, wherever these relationships go and whoever they are with”. As such, network analysis “provides a new way to study community that is based on the community relationships that people actually have rather than on the places where they live or the solidary sentiments they have” (ibid.: 17). Community is no longer perceived as a bounded unit, but as a “loosely linked relations among people and institutions, where ties often cut across boundaries” (Wellman, 1996: 29). For this reason, “formal boundaries become important analytic variables rather than a priori analytic constraints” (Wellman, 2001: 16).

Wellman proposes a concept of personal (or ego-centred) networks which he defines from the standpoint of focal persons understood as “a sample of individuals at the centers of their own networks” (2001: 19). In other words, personal communities are those connected to the individuals at their centres—“networks centre on the individual in a way that communities do not; they radiate outwards from actors, tracing the connections of their various social relationships” (Day, 2006: 217). Family, friends, neighbours, acquaintances, co-workers are personal community members, and are often connected to each other. As Wellman puts it: “All persons with whom one is directly connected are indirectly linked to each other through oneself. Each individual is a member of the unique personal networks of all of the people with whom he or she is linked, and membership in these networks serves to connect a number of social circles” (Wellman, 1979: 1226).

Personal networks provide individuals with social support and access to resources. They encompass a range of relationships, of which intimate relations are only a part. According to Wellman “contemporary Western communities are rarely tightly bounded, densely knit groups of broadly based ties. They are usually loosely bounded, sparsely knit, ramifying networks of specialized ties” (2001: 18). Yet still they may be considered community, and they play a significant role in people’s lives. The distinction between weak and strong ties has been introduced by Granovetter. The distinction is based on the intensity (length and frequency) of contacts and so strong ties are found among family and friends, while weak ties are observed between neighbours and work colleagues. Granovetter introduces also the concept of “absent ties” which he refers to relationships with no substantial significance, like with people we recognise from living on the same street or doing shopping in the same shop. In his celebrated work ‘The strength of weak ties’, based on the research on how people found their jobs in the early 1970s, Granovetter notes that although we traditionally value weak ties less than strong ties, they tend to provide indirect access to a greater diversity of resources than do stronger, more socially homogeneous ties.

The weakness of classical network analysis, however, is that it does not allow to gather qualitative information about the meaning and nature of the relationships linking individuals. After all, a family may meet regularly but remain strangers to each other, just as the reverse may be true—close ties are not accompanied by frequent contact. Ray Pahl (Pahl & Spencer, 2004; Spencer & Pahl, 2006) decided to overcome this weakness in his research on friendship. He asked his respondents to write the names of persons with whom they have relationships on sticky labels and then, depending on the intimacy and closeness of the relationship with a given person, to place her/him in the corresponding circle drawn around the respondent. The personal networks observed in this way reflected people’s “micro-social worlds”. They constituted ‘personal communities’ understood as a “specific subset of people’s informal social relationships—those who are important to them at the time, rather than all the people they know no matter how tenuous the connection. Consequently, personal communities represent people’s significant personal relationships and include bonds which give both structure and meaning to their lives. As such, personal communities provide a kind of continuity through shared memories and help to develop a person’s sense of identity and belonging” (2006: 40).

According to Pahl “People nowadays can be bound together in many different ways and the concept of a personal community enables us to identify and describe these different linkages” (2006: 209). Pahl identified five such basic types of personal communities: friend-based, family-based, neighbour-based, partner-based and professional-based. They differ in the composition of given and chosen ties, roles played to the focal person and the breadth of their supportive base. The author observes that in contemporary society the role of friendship-based communities is growing. According to Pahl, “friend-based personal communities are very much chosen communities where people are mainly included because of the intrinsic quality of the relationships, rather than for normative or cultural reasons. (…) These communities are characterized by the wide range of roles played by friends, and friends provide the mainstay of social support”. Such friend-based communities slowly displace family-based communities (Pahl, 2000). On the one hand, this has a functional rationale: we are increasingly living away from our immediate family and friends located locally seem to replace the family, providing the support that the family traditionally provided. On the other hand, however, it is indicative of the growing importance of chosen ties and autonomy in individuals’ construction of their own identity, which is achieved rather than ascribed.

Claude Fischer (1982), who views urban community as based on friendship and kinship networks, would agree with the thesis of the importance of friendship in describing social relations in contemporary cities. Both authors also agree on the wider significance of intimate personal networks for social life. They not only connect individuals to each other, but also provide a foundation for social cohesion. They are not only a source of support for individuals, but also define their values and attitudes. They provide identity and sense of belonging. They contribute to social integration through a set of cross-cutting allegiances. They are the source of moral connections and commitment, fostering some form of collective being: “Personal communities may be personal and individual, but they are not necessarily individualistic. Indeed, our research has demonstrated that far from being isolated, anomic or narcissistically self-focused, people may still feel connected and committed to others, through their personal communities, in a significant and meaningful way” (Spencer & Pahl, 2006: 209).

Contemporary personal ties are, as Wellman argued, spatially dispersed. Spatial disintegration of the community and its liberation from territoriality was forced by the accelerated industrialisation and urbanisation that induced separation of work from dwelling space. On the other hand, however, what allowed communities to persist despite their spatial dispersion was the development of the means of communication technology, especially the development of new media. As Gerard Delanty notes, “In the past, technology was seen as undermining community, but today in the age of ‘soft’ technologies, community has been given new possibilities for its expression. This necessitates a new approach to community” (2003: 167). It is therefore not surprising that the focus of many community researchers has shifted to this new direction, namely to virtual, cyber or network communities—communities based on new communication technologies (eg. Calhoun, 1992; Castels, 2001; Castels, Rheingold, 1993; Holmes, 1997). The term “virtual community” has been introduced by Rheinhold, who defines it as “social aggregation that emerge from the [Internet] when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace” (1993: 5). Such communities are highly individualised and personalised, based on the exchange of information, sharing of interests and mutual social support. They are not based on territory or demographic or socio-economic similarity. Relations between users are described as third-degree connections in which sociability is privatised. They are also characterised by anonymity and experimentation with identity. Mark Smith (1992) describes such communities as apospatial (they are not limited geographically), asynchronous (they do not need to take place in real time), disembodied (text is paramount), astigmatic (they are free from stigma) and anonymous. These features pertain to virtual community only and cannot be found in reality. According to Gerard Delanty “technologically mediated communities (…) are bringing about new kinds of social groups, which are polymorphous, highly personalized and often expressive, but they can also take more traditional forms, reconstituting families and rural areas and even political movements. In these communities, which are often acted out in the global context, belonging has reshaped radically, leading many to question the very possibility of belonging as it disappears into the flow of communication. The result is that place, locality and symbolic ties are being drained of any content, and in their place are more fluid and temporary forms of social relations sustained only by process of communication outside of which they have no reality” (ibid.: 168).

The positions of community studies around virtual communities are nevertheless divergent and at least several axes of disagreement can be identified. The first is the very idea of virtual reality and its opposition to real communities. For Reinhold, for example, the virtual community is a distinct entity from real communities. The author perceives the Internet as an alternative reality to the “actual” reality of everyday social life. What is more, the Internet and internet-based virtual community is also a better reality to which enslaved individuals can “escape” from the oppressive structure of the real social world. This need to escape from the oppressive reality is, according to Reinhold, the fundamental reason for development of the virtual communities (1993: 62). In Rheingold’s work, then, the real world and the virtual world constitute an opposition. Castells sees it differently. According to the author of the “Internet Galaxy”, a virtual community is only “an extension of life as it is, in all its dimensions, and with all its modalities. (…) Even in role-playing and informal chat rooms, real lives (including real lives on-line) seem to shape the interaction on-line” (Castells, 2001: 118). The second area of disagreement is the question of the primary or secondary nature of virtual communities versus the ‘real’ ones. Reinhold sees virtual communities as primary ones, which may sometimes move to the real world. He argues that virtual communities would never exist without the internet. It is entirely thanks to the internet and communication technologies that the emergence of these communities has become possible. For Castells (2001) and Calhoun (1992), on the other hand, virtual communities rather supplement or support already existing relations than create new ones. Basing on profound desk research on virtual communities, Castells claims that Internet plays important role in maintaining both weak ties “which otherwise would be lost in the trade-off between the effort to engage in physical interaction (including telephone interaction) and the value of the communication” (2001: 129) and strong ties at a distance, making it “easier to mark a presence without engaging in a deeper interaction for which the emotional energy is not available every day” (ibid.: 130). Finally, there are different assessments of the impact of virtual communities on various processes in the real world. To Reinhold alternative virtual reality has the capacity to transform “real” social life as well as to create new social relations that otherwise do not exist. According to Rheingold, virtual communities being an escape from the real everyday life, increase human psychological well-being and as such benefit society at large. The author also points to the healing nature of virtual belonging. Castells’s position is different: “In contrast to claims purporting the Internet to be either a source of renewed community or a cause of alienation from the real world, social interaction on the Internet does not seem to have a direct effect on the patterning of everyday life, generally speaking, except for adding on-line interaction to existing social relationships” (Castells, 2001: 119). On the other hand, however, Castells notices the empowering effect of virtual communities, which in his view are more democratic than other forms of communication, allow for social inclusion of marginalised groups and foster democratisation. This last statement is controversial, taking into account the problem of digital exclusion—according to data from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in 2020, around 53% of the global population did not have access to the Internet.

Many believe that networks become the dominant form of social organisation and that any explanation of the contemporary fluid world is not possible without the concept of a network (Lash & Urry, 1994; Wellman, 2001). This view appears to be gaining adherents as technology and globalisation advance. Manuel Castells even proclaims the advent of the network society: “a society whose social structure is made up of networks powered by micro-electronics-based information and communications technologies” (2004: 3; cf. Castells 1996). However, while the network approach in community studies has gained prominence, it is not without its critics. The approach is criticised first of all for being reductionist, as it tends to reduce complex social phenomena to networks and ignores other important factors such as culture, history, power dynamics and individual agency. By focusing primarily on network structures and connections, it may oversimplify the multifaceted nature of communities. The network approach pays no attention to social context, seeing networks as abstract entities disconnected from the larger social systems, which can limit the understanding of how external factors shape and influence them. It also underestimates the importance of institutions and institutionalisation and ignores the role of consciousness and collective imagination in the constitution of a community. The approach emphasises the structural aspects of social ties while overlooking their cultural dimension such as shared values, meanings and norms. Ignoring these elements leads to an incomplete understanding of the community process. Communities cannot be reduced to personal networks. As Blokland (2017: 65) puts it they “consist of more than just interpersonal ties. At the same time, not all our personal ties may be thought of as community”. While the approach offers valuable insights into social relationships and connectivity, it should be complemented with other theoretical frameworks and approaches to provide a more comprehensive understanding of communities.

Community Liberated: Community as Sense of Belonging

The community-as-sense-of belonging approach in community studies may be considered a fruit of the cultural turn in social theory that emphasises the significance of culture, meaning, symbols, language and discourse in shaping social life. As a result of the cultural turn, the community-as-sense-of-belonging approach focuses on the cultural and psychosocial layer of the phenomenon, namely on collective cultural consciousness and sense of belonging, disregarding spatial or structural aspects of community formation. Three works significantly contributed to the cultural turn in community studies, completely changing the way we view the essence of community. These are Victor Turner’s seminal work “The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure” (Turner, 1969), Benedict Anderson’s book “Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism” (Anderson, 1983), and Anthony Cohen’s essay “The Symbolic Construction of Community” (Cohen, 1985).

Victor Turner introduces the concept of liminality, which he borrows from Arnold Van Gennep’s anthropological work on rites of passage (van Gennep, 1960 [1908]). Liminality refers to the moments “betwixt and between” the pre- and post-ritual status of the individuals when they experience ambiguity and disorientation of the indefinable social and spiritual location (being “no longer” and simultaneously also “not yet”, neither here nor there), and at the same time a particular communion with other participants of the rite. Transferred to everyday life, the concept of liminality may be used to define a particular state of spiritual celebration that accompanies all kinds of rituals, carnivals, pilgrimages, but also various forms of leisure and participation in mass cultural events such as concerts, etc. According to Turner, it is in these liminal moments, separated from familiar and habitual, described by him as “in and out of time,” that the essence of community comes alive. A particular form of collective consciousness is then produced, a community spirit, which Turner terms communitas. Communitas is the essence of society, the purest form of community, which is found in all societies in its deepest layers of socialisation. It offers “a blend of loveliness and sacredness, of homogeneity and comradeship” (Turner, 1969: 96). Communitas resists structure, and its essence is anti-structure, so it is only the anti-structurality of liminal moments that allows communitas to manifest itself. All social hierarchies as well as social order are suspended in these moments, and people become one. Channels of unmediated communication between participants are opened and cultural domains that transcend the limitations of class, gender, race, nationality, politics, religion or even geography are created (Blackshaw, 2010: 91). People become “united through some ostensibly higher power that is profoundly revelatory of the egalitarian/community spirit which feels something like the true essence of human condition” (Blackshaw, 2010: 90). Liminality is thus for Turner an expression of pure communitas. (Turner, 1969: 112). Turner identifies 3 types of communitas: spontaneous communitas is “a direct, immediate and total confrontation of human identities” in which individuals “become totally absorbed into a single, synchronized, fluid event”; ideological communitas refers to utopian models of societies where spontaneous communitas is considered the organising rule; and normative communitas is “a perduring social system, a subculture or group which attempts to foster and maintain relationships of spontaneous communitas on a more or less permanent basis” (Turner, 1974: 79–80).

Another important concept that played a significant role in the development of the culturalist approach is the idea of imagined community, which we owe to Benedict Anderson. The author uses this concept to explain the process of the formation of nationalism and its impact on the emergence of the nation-state. He points out that this process was made possible by a number of factors, one of the most important of which was the development of the media and mass communication, including in particular the development of printing and the literacy of the population. He argues that with the rise of remote communication and the increasing mobility of individuals, the role of face-to-face relationships in the constitution of community is being replaced by the imaginary. For Anderson, then, the nation is a socially constructed imaginary community: the members of this community do not know each other and do not interact with each other face-to-face, yet they feel connected to each other because they are united by an imagined community and a sense of belonging to it—a “deep, horizontal comradeship” (1983: 16), based on a belief in a shared history, culture and purpose. Imagined community, then, is a form of collective consciousness produced through communication technologies, through which individuals learn about each other and build in their minds a mental image of their affinity. Such a community is thus nothing more than a collective state of mind. It is not only the nation that is this type of community. People identify with various imagined communities with which they share a belief in common values, aspirations or similarity of experiences. Thus, Anderson proposes a notion of community that does not arise on the basis of actual social relations, actual interactions, but is a mental construct, created in the minds of individuals based on tacitly accepted beliefs about a commonality of history, experience, culture and values or aspirations and interests.

Similarly for Anthony Cohen, community is a felt imagery reality rather than a realistically existing historical entity or institutional arrangements. According to this author, these are the certain feelings and experiences of individuals that constitute community: “The reality of community lies in its members’ perception of the vitality of its culture. People construct community symbolically, making it a resource and repository of meaning, and a referent to their identity” (Cohen, 1985: 118). Community is created through the symbolic construction of boundaries: defining through symbolic practices “we” and “they”, identifying with some and distancing from others, stipulating who belongs and who falls outside. Cohen thus understands community in a relational way: it is always defined by reference to others. The symbolic defining of a community takes place through the attribution of significance to certain values, traits and attributes, and is enacted by participation in various rituals that confirm membership in the community. While the boundaries between us and them can be very subtle and imperceptible to an outside observer, they are perfectly recognised by practising community members. Community is thus a special kind of awareness that a group has about itself in relation to other groups. As Day puts it, for Cohen “community is a particular kind of group, consisting of all those who affiliate themselves to, and make use of, a distinctive framework of symbols. Through doing so, they set limits to their variation, and generate a form of collective being” (Day, 2006: 161). This collective being is created through the complex practices of everyday life, whose symbolic meanings allow individuals to recognise each other as “we” and at the same time distinguish themselves from “they.“ Those who form this collective being, the “we,” are able to “identify themselves with the symbols, show that they understand them, and thereby exclude others who lack the same awareness” (Day, 2006: 160). A community is thus “a cluster of symbolic and ideological map references with which the individual is socially oriented” (Cohen, 1985: 57). Since symbols require interpretation, a community is not a closed or rigid structure, but an open and fluid system of cultural codification (Delanty, 2003: 47). Different individuals, in different situations, may attribute different meanings to the same symbols. A community is therefore not necessarily based on unity and similarity, “It is a commonality of forms (ways of behaving) whose content (meaning) may vary considerably among its members” (Cohen, 1985: 20, after Delanty, 2003: 47).

The cultural turn, thus, gave place to the development of the psychosocial or community-as-sense-of-belonging approach, which attributes decisive importance to the psychological, psychosocial and cultural dimensions that constitute a community, such as sense of belonging, shared identity and collective self-awareness. It is argued that with the rise of remote communication and the increasing mobility of individuals, the role of face-to-face relationships in the constitution of community is being replaced by the imaginary (Anderson, 1983). Thus, as Vered Amit observes, community now seen as an imaginary or a form of socialisation becomes “much more than a locality, it can mean virtually any form of collective cultural self-consciousness”. (Amit, 2002: 6). Such an approach includes all the manifestations of communities based on a shared cultural identity, often anonymous and mediated, taking only the form of an imagined community. They function in cultural consciousness and are reduced by researchers to their cultural nature. In all these cases, participation in the community is an individual choice of the individual and is based on an individual sense of belonging. They are all manifestations of the “new communality” (cf. Klekotko, 2012; Klekotko & Gorlach, 2011), that is, a “private” community, chosen by individuals seeking cultural identities or social support. The permanence of the community is sustained by the individual's cultural identity, and the individual remains a member of the community as long as the values of the community are part of their identity. The psychosocial perspective by seeing community as an imaginary or collective cultural self-consciousness, encompasses a great variety of concepts and studies of phenomena, including, among others, neo-tribes (Maffesoli, 1996), communities of taste (Lash, 1994) or lifestyle communities (Day, 2006; Shields, 1992). All these approaches define community as based on a more or less (usually less than more) durable and conscious sense of belonging that is detached from territorial grounding, spatially dispersed or occupying so-called spaces-in-between or non-places (non-places; Augé, 1995). Such communities are characterised by individualism and the “privatisation” of community. They are symbolically constructed (Cohen, 1985), “nomadic, highly mobile, emotional and communicative, (…) sustained by mass culture or aesthetic sensibilities and practices” (Delanty, 2003: 132; Lash, 1994; cf. Maffesoli, 1996).

An example of an approach that sees the essence of community in aesthetic sensibilities and practices is the celebrated concept of neo-tribalism by French sociologist Michel Maffesoli. The author starts with a critique of the thesis of a mass society whose order is determined by individualism and in which there is no place for community ties. According to the author, the process of disembeddement accompanying the individualisation of the modern era inevitably leads to re-embeddement, i.e. deindividuation and the formation of new forms of socialisation and social bonds. This new form of socialisation is to be, above all, neo-tribes: affective communities, based on intersubjective, collectively experienced sentiment. As Maffesoli writes in the preface to the third edition of the book “Time of the tribes”: “we are just experiencing anew, in all areas, a passion for community. (…) there is a pull that pushes us towards the other” (2008: 14). Maffesoli names this process a “tribalization of masses”. According to the author, the principles of individuation and separation, which were the foundation of the rational era, give way in the mass society to a lack of differentiation and the “loss” in a collective subject (1996: 11).

Maffesoli, referring to the classics of sociology, bases his considerations on the distinction between two types of social relations constituting the social and the sociality. The social is characteristic of modern societies, operating on a mechanical structure dominated by economic and political organisations, in which individuals occupy positions and perform functions that define their identity, and any groupings are of a contractual nature. The sociality, on the other hand, typical for postmodernity in which the masses dominate, is characterised by organic structure and an increase in the importance of the roles played by the personas (persons) in the affectual tribes: “Here we can recognize the idea of the persona, the changeable mask which blends into a variety of scenes and situations whose only value resides in the fact that they are played out by the many (..) Whereas the individualist logic is founded on a separate and self-contained identity, the person (persona) can only find fulfilment in his relations with others (…) No longer is my personal history based on a contractual arrangement with other rational individuals; rather it is a myth in which I am an active participant” (1996: 10). The transition from modernity to postmodernity involves a shift from social to sociality, from mechanic to organic, from functions to roles, from individuals to persons, from contractual groupings to fellow feelings, from rational to empathetic and from orientation towards future to orientation towards presence. As the author puts it: “Briefly, and taking the terms in their most accepted sense, we can say that we are witnessing the tendency for a rationalized ‘social’ to be replaced by an empathetic ‘sociality’, which is expressed by a succession of ambiences, feelings and emotions”. The new form of sociality is reminiscent of the Weberian “Gemeinde”, whose characteristics are “their ephemeral aspect; ‘changeable composition’; ‘ill-defined nature’; local flavour; their ‘lack of organization’ and routinization” (1996: 12). It is this form of socialisation that Maffesoli believes will be “the dominant value in the coming decades” (2008: 3).

Neo-tribes are characterised by an aesthetic aura (aisthetikos) that is based on the collective sensibility—being a member of a neo-tribe is about experiencing this aura collectively. Explaining the meaning of aura, Maffesoli refers to German Romanticism and the concept of atmosphere (Stimmung), an emotional ambience, which describes a state of emotional loss in a collective subject and reveals “the holistic climate underlying the resurgence of solidarity and the organicity of all things” (ibid.: 14). The aesthetic aura unites personas, providing them with sources of identity as members of a group united by common feelings, emotions and aesthetic impressions. The aesthetic aura leads to ethical experience—a kind of “different morality”, as Maffesoli calls it, which sustains the community and guarantees the maintenance of basic conformism by its members. Despite its unstable, open form and its tendency to fall into anomie, it adopts a certain order and is guided by certain principles that remain legible to the members of the community precisely because of their shared aesthetic sensibility. As the author puts it: There is a “law of the milieu” that is difficult to escape (ibid.: 15). Neo-tribes are held together by symbolic rituals, which reinforce the sense of belonging and identity within a group and thus sustain the community. The rituals can be mundane or everyday activities, such as leisure pursuits, fashion trends, music festivals, or subcultural practices. Through these rituals, individuals within neo-tribes affirm their belongingness and establish a sense of identity. In summary, Maffesoli’s concept of the neo-tribe highlights the rise of new forms of social groupings based on affective bonds, shared affinities and symbolic rituals. It emphasises the importance of emotional connection, sense of belongingness, feeling of familiarity and proximity, experience of group solidarity and the pursuit of pleasure and meaning.

Graham Day (2006), in the chapter of his book “Community and Everyday Life” on “New Directions for Community”, points to lifestyle groupings as one of the potential varieties of contemporary communities and thus research directions in community studies. As he notes: “Lifestyle groupings (…) are capable of unifying many social networks within a set of shared cultural codes and preferences, and can be marked as well by other trappings of community, such as an association with particular spaces or locales, distinctive markers of identification, and occasional social gatherings” (2006: 219). According to Day, lifestyle communities are much more than an act of consumption, they “imply design for living, possibly even a way of conducting oneself across a lifetime” (ibid.). Adopted consumption and lifestyle patterns define an individual’s identity, who they want to be and how they want to be perceived by others. “People are likely to have some sense of belonging to a given lifestyle, and through it can identify themselves with others who are like-minded. Lifestyle provides a point of reference against which to stabilize a sense of self, and find the security which might have been supplied previously by membership of a community” (ibid.: 220). It is common for individuals to feel a sense of connection and kinship with a particular way of living, which allows them to relate to others who share similar values and beliefs. Lifestyle serves as a framework for individuals to establish and maintain a sense of identity, as well as a source of comfort and validation that may have been previously provided by community ties. The author draws attention to the shared identity that emerges from the practice of a similar lifestyle and the boundary work that inevitably accompanies this practice: “Those who share a similar lifestyle can be assumed to have comparable attitudes and values, to make similar comparisons between themselves and others, and probably show a propensity to come into contact from time to time. The dynamics of group affiliation produce differentiation and distance between such groupings; approval for a particular lifestyle often denotes disapproval for others. Thus lifestyle groupings can take on a collective identity, and it is not unusual to hear them referred to as ‘communities’”.

In a similar vein, Scott Lash (1994) develops his concept of community of taste. For Lash community of taste is a product of reflexive modernity and can be understood in regard to Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of the “field” and “habitus”. The author claims that modernity, with its emphasis on rationality and scientific knowledge, has made it challenging to find meaning in life. However, Lash suggests that the aesthetic realm may provide hints as to how meaning can still exist in modern society (1993: 162). By aesthetic experiences, individuals can connect with emotions that go beyond the rational and scientific and can find a sense of purpose and meaning through these connections. Therefore, as societies become more diverse and fragmented, people are less likely to rely on traditional forms of social identification like class, religion, or ethnicity. Instead, they turn to more fluid and flexible forms of identity that are based on individual aesthetic choices and cultural preferences including taste in music, fashion, art, and other forms of expression. The community of taste is a way for individuals to construct their identities in a world where traditional forms of identity are no longer sufficient. By sharing aesthetic experiences individuals are able to connect with others and develop a sense of belonging. Lash defines the cultural “we” of communities of taste as “collectives of shared background practices, shared meanings, shared routine activities involved in the achievement of meaning” (ibid.: 147). Communities of taste are thus not about shared interests or proprieties but about shared meanings and “routine background practices”. The author stresses that “to be in a taste community, which takes on the facticity of community, entails shared meanings, practices and obligations” (ibid.: 161). According to Lash, reflexivity plays a crucial role in formation of community of taste, claiming that communities of taste “are reflexive in that: first, one is not born or ‘thrown’, but ‘throws oneself’ into them; second, they may be widely stretched over ‘abstract’ space, and also perhaps over time; third, they consciously pose themselves the problem of their own creation, and constant re-invention far more than do traditional communities; fourth, their ‘tools’ and products tend to be not material ones but abstract and cultural” (ibid.: 161). Thus, the concept developed by Lash provides inspiring insights into the role of shared cultural preferences and aesthetic tastes in shaping people’s sense of belonging and identity in reflexive modernity.

Cultural groupings are also of interest to Rob Shields who uses the concept of lifestyle community pointing to the community-forming aspects of lifestyle shopping. In his work on lifestyle shopping, Shields refers to Simmel’s notion of “sociality”, arguing that contemporary shopping centres provide the substrate for its development. He starts with the assumption that in the postmodern era, consumption is changing its role, taking on symbolic value and “commodities become valued for their aura of symbolic meanings and values rather than their use or exchange value” (ibid.: 99). He refers to this change under the term “new regime of value”, locating its origins, following Harvey, in the development of capitalism, particularly emergence of global production and the rise of “consumption spaces” in cities. He views consumption spaces as “key sites of symbolic consumption as well as of new social movements and groupings whose mixing appears to defy the accepted logic of social classes based on relations to means of production” (ibid.: 101). The author notes that although these spaces are usually owned by private capital, this does not prevent them from being perceived by people as public spaces and appropriated by communities as “theirs”.

Nowadays, shopping is a practice of leisure, “a social practice of exploration and sightseeing akin to tourism” (102). We go shopping not only to buy products we need, but above all for entertainment, seeking to satisfy not only functional, but above all aesthetic needs. Shields places the community-building forces of lifestyle shopping in the shopping centre considered as a meeting point that provides social centrality. Shields points to the latent function of shopping that is social in nature, as it turns the shopping space into a place for meeting, communication and social exchange, just like traditional marketplaces, fairs and nineteenth-century rural post office in Canada did. Even if today's shopping spaces do not resemble the marketplaces of the past and the chances of meeting acquaintances are incomparably smaller, even the slight possibility of bumping into someone familiar, or even the mere fact of being among others, observing and gathering information about others, fulfils a traditional latent social function of shopping. Shields uses Lefebrian (1981) notion of social centrality for capturing the essence of latent social function of shopping, that describes “gathering-together-ness of the act of dwelling in the face of the diffuseness of the world (…): a wilful concentration which creates a node in a wider landscape of continual dispersion” (ibid.: 103). It is then about the sociality that accompanies the practices of shopping in the shopping mall. As Shields put it: “Consumption (…) takes on more and more social functions as a form of sociality. This serves in the reconstruction and realignment community around the tactility of the crowd practices and “tribal” ethos of the new urban spaces of consumption” (ibid.: 110). In his reflections on the community dimension of lifestyle shopping, Shields goes further: he assumes that “The crowd practice of social centrality is supported by two factors. First (…) the public nature of a site crowded with other people is inescapable and undeniable. (…) Second, the crowd practice of social centrality crosses social divisions” (ibid.: 103). As such, lifestyle shopping becomes “a communal activity, even a form of solidarity” (ibid.: 110). Shopping malls are not only consumption spaces of social centrality but provide experience of sociality: “the glutinum mundi and connecting tissues of everyday interaction and cooperation” (ibid.: 105). The essence of this experience is, in Shields’ terms, “the power of collective, the sense of being together, the urge to get by and the injunction to get along together” (ibid.: 106). According to Shields, while modernity banished sociality into the realm of private life, postmodernity restores it to its place in the public spaces and consumption spaces of social centrality, where, shoppers granted their unique identities as personas (“a new cultural form of the subject in the postmodern public sphere [that] names the changeable nature of personal identity which defies formal rationalism and describes the decline of the modernist individual” (ibid.: 110), orient themselves to each other and mutually adjust, constituting together an affectual community. There is no denying to Shields that contemporary shopping malls aspire to play such a role—to be an important place on the map of the local community, a place for meetings, important events, the flourishing of local culture and a source of local identification. As Shields aptly notes, by taking over the functions of many traditional urban institutions, “Shopping malls have become de facto community centres”.

The cultural approach represents an important breakthrough in community studies providing valuable insights about the role of culture and aesthetics in shaping community. However, the approach is not free from limitations. Conceptualising community as any form of collective cultural self-consciousness, the approach may be accused of being too vague and thus theoretically vacuous. On the other hand, as it focuses entirely on cultural factors in conceptualising community, the approach fosters cultural reductionism. It places excessive emphasis on symbolic meanings, symbols and rituals, while neglecting material conditions and material inequalities that significantly impact communities. It also abstracts from the structural-spatial context and, as a consequence, fails to recognise the role of space in establishing social bonds. The approach also overemphasises individual agency in community-building processes. By considering the community as a free choice of individuals looking for meaning, it liberates actors from structural pressures and tensions that also shape community experiences and outcomes. Finally, the approach tends to essentialise communities by assuming a fixed, homogeneous set of cultural practices and values that are shared by community members and shape their identities. This overlooks the internal diversity and complexities within communities and can lead to stereotypes or oversimplifications. All these shortcomings can result in an incomplete understanding of community dynamics.

Between Agency and Structure: Towards Praxeological Turn

None of the answers given by sociology to the community question seems complete or satisfactory (cf. Klekotko, 2018a, 2018b). The ecological trend, which sees communities in neighbourhoods based on common territory and spatial proximity, on the basis of which networks of functional-structural dependencies and interests, as well as a sense of bonding and belonging, are formed, ignores the fact of the extraordinary mobility of inhabitants of modern cities (both long-term and daily routines) and the related fluidity and interchangeability of populations, which make it impossible to create permanent functional-affective structures in neighbourhood spaces (cf. Blokland, 2003; Nawratek, 2011, 2012). On the other hand, the network and psychosocial trend, which—“liberating” the community from its territorial base—bases it exclusively on the individual’s ties and sense of belonging, thus extending its meanings to “practically every form of collective cultural self-consciousness” (cf. Amit, 2002, p. 6), wrongly invalidates the significance of space for the processes of forming bonds, social networks and imaginations. None of the presented currents in community studies allows us to accurately describe a significant range of phenomena that we observe in contemporary, postmodern cities, such as the so-called pop-up city, urban guerrillas, numerous grassroots and ephemeral ludic initiatives and community leisure practices, identification and placemaking by so-called contemporary nomads, etc. The first current views community too statically in the form of a permanent local structure, based on the dependencies of spatial proximity, and exhibits environmental determinism. This approach negates the fluid and mobile nature of modern cities and the communities that inhabit them (Nawratek, 2011, 2012). Moreover, it wrongly equates neighbourhood with community, although these concepts do not describe identical phenomena and should be treated separately (Blokland, 2003). It also fails to recognize non-territorial aspects of the cultural formation of communities, paying too much attention to specific spatial forms of community, and too little to the processes of establishing, maintaining and reconstructing ties as such (cf. Wellman, 1979). The second trend, on the other hand, abstracts from the structural-spatial context and, as a consequence, fails to see the manifestations of localisation of bond-creating processes, or the importance of place as a resource space or intermediary in establishing supra-local bonds while presenting an excessive cultural reductionism, which reduces community to a collective cultural image. To some extent, the differences between these two approaches reflect the conflict between structure and agency, that is, structural pressures and the subjectivity of actors. The former approach places too much emphasis on the whole and its permanence and fails to recognise the importance of individual cultural practices in the emergence and reproduction of local communities. The latter, on the other hand, overemphasises individual free choice and the individualistic nature of personal communities and frees individuals from the structural pressures and tensions of the spatial context. Therefore, there is a gap in classical debates on community questions that need to be addressed.

There are some attempts in recent community studies to overcome the aforementioned gap. One particularly promising example of such an approach is the one proposed by Talia Blokland, who adopts a relational perspective in her excellent works entitled “Urban Bonds” (2003) and “Community as Urban Practice” (2017). The author argues that, when analysing community, one should take into consideration only those relations, which are social in the Weberian sense, namely those meaningfully oriented towards the practices of others. She points out that the “other” can be both an acquaintance and a stranger, and that relationships themselves can be an “imagined” experience of bonding with others we do not know personally (ibid.: 65). The author draws attention to two kinds of social relations that seem to be a form of social ties, but neither neighbourhood nor network approach is able to capture them: durable engagements and fluid encounters. Durable engagements come into existence when people are engaged in doing something as a part of group of people doing something together, usually within some institution (2017: 67). Blokland gives an example of parents of toddlers waiting together to pick their kids from the kindergarten and points that “their durable engagements generated social capital and possibly a sense of shared identities that were at least situationally bound to being parents of toddlers” (ibid.). Fluid encounters, on the other hand, “include all interactions that are unplanned and happen as a result of people’s doing something else, by virtue of the simple fact that the world is a busy place. They may be completely accidental, superficial and very brief (…). They may also occur repeatedly and more regularly (…) (2017: 70).

The author bases her position on the achievements of the cultural turn, recognising community as a cultural phenomenon. She pays particular attention to the processes of symbolic boundary-making and the development of a sense of belonging. However, she rejects individualistic approaches to community: in her view, community is not an individual experience and self-identification, but occurs between individuals in everyday social relations. The author advocates a praxeological approach to community, although she does not develop it consequently, claiming that community manifests itself through everyday practices in urban space. As she writes, “Community consists of practices in which we convey a shared positioning, develop shared experiences, or construct a shared narrative of belonging. This means that we also draw boundaries to delineate whom we do not share with” (2017: 88). In her conception of the community as practice, the author refers to Weber’s notion of social action, which she defines, following Weber, as one with which an individual associates some subjective meaning and in which he or she takes into account the behaviour of others and orientates his or her actions to the actions of others. Blokland uses the Weberian typology of actions and bases her matrix of community ties and relations within the neighbourhood on it. The division between rational and irrational actions (affective and traditional) marks the first dimension of this matrix. At one pole of it are rational ties, resulting from the conscious decisions of individuals, and at the other pole are irrational ties. The second axis of the matrix is the division between purpose-rational and value-rational actions. The former, determined by expectations of achieving specific goals, mark instrumental ties, while the latter, oriented towards the value of action itself, mark the extremity of sociability, which the author seems to define as non-instrumental, voluntary action based on affinity and affectivity (ibid.: 67), where “affinity relies on the recognition of similar values or ideas” and affectivity “appeals to feelings” (2017: 73–74).

Constructed in this way, the matrix allows her to delineate four types of ideal social ties: transactions, interdependence, attachment and bonds. Transactions are a type of rational-instrumental ties, linking roles rather than specific individuals. Individuals consciously establish relationships with others in order to achieve specific, non-social goals. The socio-rational nature of actions, on the other hand, is defined by attachment. In this case, individuals establish relationships with others based on their affinity. Bonds are the non-rational-social variety of ties, i.e. a form of bonding that is established in an unplanned, spontaneous and affective manner, and its essence is experienced. Finally, the last form distinguished by the Author is interdependence, by which she seems to mean relations with abstract “others” established involuntarily by individuals in the socio-institutional setting in which these individuals operate. They all do community.

Blokland advocates a relational approach to community and belonging and proposes to treat all the forms of ties she proposes as “relational settings of belonging”. “Community as an urban practice depends on the relational settings in which our social ties are embedded (…) These relational settings move along two dimensions: the continuum of privacy and continuum of access” (2017: 89). The continuum of privacy refers to control over the information others have about us and extends from intimacy with very little control to anonymity with maximum control. The continuum of access expresses the control of access to space, where one end of this continuum is formed by the private sphere and the other by the public sphere. In the middle of these dimensions, between private and public on one hand, and anonymous and intimate on the other, there is a space of public familiarity, which is “a social space constructed in physical space through interactions that we take part in and that we observe” (2017: 132). As Blokland puts it: “Public familiarity characterizes a social fabric of the city where, due to repeated fluid encounters and durable engagement, individuals are able to socially place others, to recognize them, and even to expect to see them” (2017: 126). It “makes it possible to experience an urban space as a place where we belong or at least as a comfort zone” (ibid.: 94, cf. Blokland & Nast, 2014). As the author notes, even in the most anonymous relational settings dominated by interdependencies and transactions, individuals still can develop narratives of belonging, if only they achieve a level of comfort: “As we go about adapting to what we learn as situational normality, we create and express a form of belonging” (ibid.: 114). With the concept of public familiarity Blokland tries to “move away from Simmel’s conception of the city as an anonymous setting where a blasé attitude prevails, as well as from the representation of the city as a place with urban villages” (ibid.: 131). She claims that “in urban everyday practices fluid encounters and durable engagements may constitute a performance of community that is neither public nor private, neither intimate nor anonymous, but that covers a broad range of possibilities in between” (ibid.).

The relational approach developed by Talia Blokland provides valuable insights about community life in contemporary cities, while some of her praxeological attempts in defining community as practice open the door to further developments in the field of community studies. However, the author does not provide any conceptual framework for analysis of practices and her understanding of the term itself is taken for granted. Moreover, focusing in fact on the relational approach, the author does not sufficiently recognize the significant role of space in community practices nor of the social and material context within which social relations are established and developed. These limit our understanding of mechanisms of community practice in an urban context. The interrelations between space and community practices are still not well explored. The concept of community developed by Blokland exposes the shortcomings of the relational approach and thus points to the need to turn to other theoretical approaches, such as the theory of social practice. In other words, in order to better understand urban community as practice, new advances in social theory, known as praxeological turn, must be taken into consideration.